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tellsbooks's review
5.0
LITTTY! Yo, honestly - every poem was fire. I know that seems like hyperbole, but it's not.
Idris Goodwin is fantastic at distilling Black life, art and culture. He sends it back to us in verses that praise elements quintessential to our non-monolithic Black experience. In Can I Kick It? Goodwin talks about the beauty of Afrocentric names that melt resumes and disrupt the roll call, the strength and skill of our hip hop artists ie. MF Doom & Wu-Tang. He's not above ridiculing the sometimes the idiocy of our hip hop artists: Harriet Tubman to Kanye "slavery was a choice" West. He highlights the necessity for skincare maintenance in the form of liberally applying vaseline and lotion to keep your skin ash-free in one of my favourite pieces: Ashy to Classy: An Ode to Lotion and he talks about the things that were stolen from Black and Indigenous folks/culture, and all the things that can't be stolen from us ever again inTaken.
Two of my absolute favourite pieces are 1) an Ode to the Gospel Queen herself: Naomi Shelton called How To Listen to Gospel: An Ode to Naomi Shelton and 2) Lil Nas X Brings the Country Together - HE REALLY DID!! - think about it!
Anyway, Can I Kick It is so lit. It's only made better by the fact that he has a mixtape for this book where you can listen to some of the poetry read over beats and it's fantastic. It's quite an experience to listen to/read.
You can check out the mixtape here and you can read this book on Scribd!
Idris Goodwin is fantastic at distilling Black life, art and culture. He sends it back to us in verses that praise elements quintessential to our non-monolithic Black experience. In Can I Kick It? Goodwin talks about the beauty of Afrocentric names that melt resumes and disrupt the roll call, the strength and skill of our hip hop artists ie. MF Doom & Wu-Tang. He's not above ridiculing the sometimes the idiocy of our hip hop artists: Harriet Tubman to Kanye "slavery was a choice" West. He highlights the necessity for skincare maintenance in the form of liberally applying vaseline and lotion to keep your skin ash-free in one of my favourite pieces: Ashy to Classy: An Ode to Lotion and he talks about the things that were stolen from Black and Indigenous folks/culture, and all the things that can't be stolen from us ever again inTaken.
Two of my absolute favourite pieces are 1) an Ode to the Gospel Queen herself: Naomi Shelton called How To Listen to Gospel: An Ode to Naomi Shelton and 2) Lil Nas X Brings the Country Together - HE REALLY DID!! - think about it!
Anyway, Can I Kick It is so lit. It's only made better by the fact that he has a mixtape for this book where you can listen to some of the poetry read over beats and it's fantastic. It's quite an experience to listen to/read.
You can check out the mixtape here and you can read this book on Scribd!
thetomatowriter's review
5.0
I received an ARC of this book and have a review coming in LEO Weekly on Wednesday, but overall it was an excellent poetry collection.
ceah_reads's review against another edition
Idris Goodwin's Can I Kick It? covers such vast territory, so well, as to be difficult to review. From Christopher Columbus' violence to contemporary cell phone videos of white supremacist violence, and from the pulsing beats of Motown and hip-hop to the perfect three-pointers and the thrilling dunks, Goodwin carries us through history and politics in a joyful, sad collection of poems that speak to our realty now just as surely as they did when published in 2019.
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